Thursday, August 5, 2010

Welcome to the Shared Digital Future Library

Libraries have an unprecedented opportunity to bring together preservation and access in a way that can change the scale at which they work. What our culture has called the "Universal Library" is now more realistic than ever, and the opportunity comes at a critical time for higher education institutions. Through deep collaboration previously only imagined, libraries can now create and maintain a comprehensive digital collection and a well-coordinated and shared print collection. The cost for doing this work can be significantly reduced compared with previous ways of managing collections, allowing libraries to devote increasing amounts of attention to building better services and more dynamic relationships with the teaching and research staff at their institutions. Although the models for multi-institution, above-campus services are still being developed, HathiTrust provides one contemporary example for how that aspiration can be achieved.